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about.mdwn

Purpose

We have almost completely forgotten what morality is. People can’t asnwer fundamental questions like “what is my purpose”.

In order to test Razom in action and demonstrate how it works with large amounts of real-world data, this page documents the progress of creating a collection of art and materials of several kinds, which will be fed to Razom as data to manage.

However, that’s just technical side! The collection also helps protect works of art and our culture from greedy centers of power, spread and share knowledge, redecentralize the web and our lives in general and promote free-as-in-freedom access to humanity’s resources.

Examples of data types:

Video
Audio
Documents
Images

Video is in free format (WebM). Audio is in free format (Ogg).

Method

The whole collection will be shared using peer-to-peer technologies. This way,

There is no ownership: The content is shared by everyone equally
There is no dependency on a central storage location
There are many copies, all backing up each other
It’s resistant to censorship
It’s resistant to greed-funded law forces’ attempts to harm the system
A torrent file is just metadata, is small and can be encrypted if needed
With DHT, even a centralized torrent tracker is not needed
Probably more things I forgot :-)

The links in the lists are magnet links which you can paste in your torrent client. This way there is no specific website you need to go to or service you need to use - just paste them, and the client will download the metadata it needs directly from the trackers (or use DHT only, if there are no trackers for a torrent).

Note that some magnet links are for the regular internet (clearnet) while others are for I2P. Each link specifies this. I2P torrents have a major advantage: they are anonymous, i.e. you don’t need to worry so much about ISPs and greedy companies collecting IP addresses. They are probably a bit slower, but I downloaded many and shared many already, and they are definitely fast enough to be usable and effective just like “regular” torrents.

I2P torrent magnet links can be pasted in I2Psnark. I assume they work for other clients too, but never tried.

Scope

Unfortunately, copyright law exists. Also, unfortunately, law is very strictly enforced when it suits the rich people. And the punishment can also be very unproportional, especially for copyright law - because it suits the rich people. As a result, copyright issues may limit the scope of the collected content.

The presence of copyright law and its overrated meaning and necessity in many countries therefore divides the content into three categories:

Free-culture material you can share, redistribute and modify
Material you can share, but only the original version, and no derived work is allowed by law
Proprietary limited locked material you can personally use but cannot legally share

Basically, when you think about it with a clear open mind, any content that is not harmful in any way, and whose sharing is not harmful in any way, sounds like something worth sharing and developing. See [[statement-of-love/Law]] for further discussion.

The problem is that if the third kind of content is offered here for download, even just as a magnent link (which is not the content itself), it will scare away many people who would feel unconfortable to participate in the project. I understand them, and I know some countries are more conservative and strict about copyright issues, so I made a decision.

I removed the magnet links in the Collection, which point to proprietary material. These links may instead be found in other places, such as torrent indexes and I2P/Tor websites. This project doesn’t have any official relation to such sites, and the official Collection doesn’t contain this kind of material. If you still want to know more about it, e.g. how to create, get and share WebM and Ogg files made from proprietary content, you are welcome to ask. Also, before I removed the proprietary material I wrote some instructions. You can find them in the Git history of this wiki if you dig deep enough. But I repeat, Partager is not officially distributing any proprietary material.

I decided the only kind of material inserted into the Collection on this wiki is free culture works. There may be many good proprietary works, but I reached the conclusion there is much more than enough free-as-in-freedom content to build a large collection for testing Razom. I suppose it makes sense to collect proprietary material as well for various reasons (in a similar way to how GNU was initially developed on computers running Unix), but it is not collected on this wiki.

The preferred license is any of the Creative Commons free culture licenses. If I’m not mistaken, these are CC-BY-SA, CC0 and CC-BY. It may also make sense to have CC-BY-ND if the content is an opinion and not informative, in which case modifying it doesn’t make sense anyway. But you don’t have to deal with all those small details, especially if you don’t believe in copyright - just license it under CC-BY-SA or CC0 and paste links here :-)

It is also preferred to supply, or link to, the sources used to create and develop the content.

Contept with expired copyright is fine too. Also, there may be free culture licenses other than Creative Commons. And finally, if there is some materrial important to you, that you feel has the spirit of freedom and sharing, but whose license is unclear or prolematic - feel free to suggest it. You can also paste the links and simply attach a [[TODO|TODO/OPEN]] to it, reminding that the license should be checked.

Note that it is possible that some content is pasted here by mistake, even though it has license issues. Or maybe someone decided it’s important enough to share anyway. If you are the creator of that content and would like to complain about your work being used and shared in the Partager project, just make contact and it will be removed. However note that each country has its own copyright policy, and the policy is your country may not be the same as in the country serving the magnet links (in addition to the fact that magnet links are not the content, just like suggesting some music album to someone and referring them to a download site is not stealing, but being a good friend).

Future Plans

The content will hopefully also be available as a direct download, and video and audio can then be previewed through the web browser or streamed into your media player. But that only works scalably without causing centralization if the content is served by local community servers, so don’t expect something like Y0utub3 - it would be ironic if I offered a service like that, considering the points listed above.

For example, running multiple MediaGoblin servers backed by the same distributed repository could work.

Eventually, a Razom-based system will offer all the content. Semantic search, browsing, metadata editing, sharing etc. will be available.

[See repo JSON]